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Despite the significant increases in productivity, the working conditions in the early
cotton factories were atrocious
o Adult weavers and spinners were reluctant to leave the safety and
freedom of work in their own homes labor in noisy and dangerous
factories where the air was filled with cotton fibers
16. Why did factory owners turn to children and foundlings for labor?
 Factory owners often turned to young orphans and children who had been
abandoned by their parents and put in who had been abandoned by their parents
and put in the care of local parishes
 Parish officers often apprenticed such unfortunate foundlings to factory owners; the
parish thus saved money; the factory owners gained workers over whom they
exercised almost the authority of slave owners
 Apprenticed as young as five or six years of age, boy and girl workers were forced
by law to labor for their “masters” for as many as fourteen years
17. What were the working conditions for them?
 Housed, fed, and locked up nightly in factory dormitories, the young workers labored
thirteen or fourteen hours a day for little or no pay
 Harsh physical punishment maintained brutal discipline; hours were appalling,
commonly thirteens or fourteen hours a day, six days a week
 To be sure, poor children typically worked long hours in many types of demanding
jobs, but this wholesale coercion of orphans as factory apprentices constituted
exploitation on a truly unprecedented scale
18. Why was the creation of the world’s first machine powered factorings in the British
textile industry in the 1770 and 1780s a major historical development?
 The creation of the world’s first machine-powered factories in the British cotton
textile industry in the 1770s and 1780s, which grew out of the putting-out system of
cottage production, was a major historical development
 Both symbolically and substantially, the big new cotton mills marked the beginning of
the Industrial Revolution in Britain
 By 1831 the largely mechanized cotton textile industry accounted for fully 22 percent
of the country’s entire industrial production
19. Why was coal an alternative to wood?
 By the 18th century wood was in ever-shorter supply; processed wood (charcoal)
was the fuel that was mixed with iron ore in the blast furnace to produce pig iron
 The iron industry’s appetite for wood was enormous, and by 1740 the Brian iron
industry was stagnating; vast forests enabled Russia in the 18th century to become
the world’s leading producer of iron, much of which was exported to Britain
 By 1640 most in London were heated with coal, and it was used in industry to
provide heat for making beer, glass, soap, and other products; the breakthrough
came when industrialists began to use coal to produce mechanical energy and to
power machinery
 To produce more coal, mines had to be dug deeper and deeper and were constantly
filling with water; mechanical pumps, usually powered by animals walking in circles
at the surface, had to be installed
20. Why was the creation of the steam engine important for coal mining?

Steam Engine: a breakthrough invention by Thomas Savery in 1698 and Thomas
Newcomen in 1705 that burned coal to produce steam, which was then used to
operate a pump; the early models were superseded by James Watt’s more efficient
steam engine, patented in 1769
21. Why was the steam engine of Watt the most fundamental advance in society?
 In 1763 a gifted young Scot named James Watt was drawn to a critical study of the
steam engine; Watt was employed at the time by the University of Glasgow as a
skilled craftsman making scientific instruments
 A partnership in 1775 with Matthew Boulton, a wealthy English industrialist, provided
Watt with adequate capital and exceptional skills in salesmanship that equaled those
of the renowned pottery king, Josiah Wedgwood
 From ingenious manufactures such as the cannon maker John Wilkinson, Watt was
gradually able to purchase precision parts; this support allowed him to create an
effective vacuum in the condenser and regulate a complex engine
 By the late 1780s the firm of Boulton and Watt had made the steam engine a
practical and commercial success in Britain
 For the first time in history, humanity had, at least for a few generations, almost
unlimited power at its disposal; for the first time, inventors and engineers could
devise and implement all kinds of power equipment to aid people in their work
 The steam engine drained mines and made possible the production of ever more
coal to feed steam engines elsewhere
 The steam-power plant began to replace waterpower in cotton-spinning factories
during the 1780s, contributing greatly to that industry’s phenomenal rise
 Steam took the place of waterpower in flour mills, in the malt mills used in breweries,
in the flint mills supplying the pottery industry, and in the mills exported by Britain to
the West Indies to crush sugarcane
22. What was coke and why was it important for iron?
 Originally, the smoke and fumes resulting from coal burning meant that coal could
not be used as a cheap substitute for expensive charcoal in smelting iron
 Starting around 1710, ironmakers began to use coke, a smokeless and hot-burning
fuel produced by heating coal to rid it of water and other impurities, to smelt pig iron
 After 1770 the adoption of steam-driven bellows in blast furnaces allowed for great
increases in the quantity of pig iron produced by British ironmakers; in the 1780s
Henry Cort developed the puddling furnace, which allowed pig iron to be refined in
turn with coke
 Cort developed steam-powered rolling mills, which were capable of turning out
finished iron in every shape and form; the economic consequence of these technical
innovations was a great boom in the British iron industry
o In 1740 annual British iron production was only 17,000 tons; with the
spread of coke smelting and the impact of Cort’s inventions, production
had reached 260,000 tons by 1806; in 1844 Britain produced 3 million tons
of iron
New efficient methods of transportation and other innovations created new industries,
improved the distribution of goods, increased consumerism and enhanced the quality of
life (steamships, railroads, streetcars) New industries – chemical industry, electricity,
automobiles)
A combination of factors including geography, lack of resources, the dominance of
traditional landed elites, the persistence of serfdom in some areas, and inadequate
government sponsorship accounted for eastern and southern Europe’s lag in industrial
development.
The development of the market economy led to new financial practices and institutions
(Bank of England, New definition of property rights, insurance)
Industrialization in Prussia allowed that state to become the leader of a unified
Germany, which subsequently underwent rapid industrialization under government
sponsorship. (zollverein, List’s National System)
In some of the less industrialized areas of Europe, the dominance of agricultural elites
persisted into the 20th century
Because of the persistence of primitive agricultural practices and land owning patterns,
some areas of Europe lagged in industrialization while facing famine, debt and land
shortages (Irish potato famine, Russian serfdom
23. Why was the railroad developed? How did it transform society?
 Rails reduced friction and allowed a horse or a human being to pull a much heavier
load; thus, once a rail capable of supporting a heavy locomotive was developed in
1816, all sorts of experiments with steam engines on rails went forward
 George Stephenson acquired glory for his locomotive named Rocket, which sped
down the track of the just completed Liverpool and Manchester Railway at a
maximum speed of 24 miles per hour in 1829
 The line from Liverpool to Manchester was a financial as well as a technical
success, and many private companies quickly emerged to build more rail lines
 The railroad dramatically reduced the cost and uncertainty of shipping freight over
land
o Previously, markets had tended to be small and local; as the barrier of
high transportation costs was lowered, markets became larger and ever
nationwide
o Larger markets encouraged larger factories with more sophisticated
machinery in a growing number of industries; such factories could make
goods more cheaply and gradually subjected most cottage workers and
many urban artisans to severe competitive pressures
o In all countries, the construction of railroads created a strong demand for
unskilled labor and contributed to the growth of a class of urban workers
24. What was the Crystal Palace?
 Crystal Palace: the location of the Great Exhibition in 1851 in London; an
architectural masterpiece made entirely of glass and iron
 The more than 6 million visitors from all over Europe marveled at the gigantic new
exhibition hall set in the middle of a large, centrally located park; sponsored by the
British royal family, the exhibition celebrated the new era of industrial technology and
the kingdom’s role as world economic leader
 Britain’s claim to be the “workshop of the world” was no idle boast, for it produced
two-thirds of the world’s coal and more than half of all iron and cotton cloth
o More generally, in 1860 Britain produced a remarkable 20 percent of the
entire world’s output of industrial goods, the gross national product rose
roughly fourfold at constant prices between 1780 and 1851
o At the same time, the population of Britain boomed, growing from about 9
million in 1780 to almost 21 million in 1851; growing numbers consumed
much of the increase in total production
25. What was Malthus’ idea about population?
 Sustaining the dramatic increase in population, in turn, was only possible through
advances in production in agriculture and industry; based on the lessons of history,
many contemporaries feared that the rapid growth in population would inevitably
lead to disaster
 In Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population concluded that the only
hope of warding off such “positive checks” to population growth as famine and
disease was “prudential restraint”
 Young men and women to limit the growth of population by marrying late in life, but
Malthus was not optimistic about this possibility; the powerful attraction of the sexes,
he feared, would cause most people to marry early and have many children
26. What was Ricardo’s iron law of wages?
 Economist David Ricardo spelled out the pessimistic implications of Malthus’s
thought; Ricardo’s depressing iron law of wages posited that over an extended
period of time, because of the pressure of population growth, wages would always
sink to subsistence level
 Wages would be just high enough to keep workers from starving
 Even the 1840s, contemporary observers might reasonably have concluded that the
economy and the total population were racing neck and neck, with the outcome very
much in doubt
 Perhaps workers, farmers, and ordinary people did not get their rightful share of the
new wealth; perhaps only the rich got richer, while the poor got poorer or made no
progress
27. How did industrialization spread outside of England?
 Outside of western Europe industrialization proceeded more gradually, with uneven
jerks and national and regional variations
 Scholars are still struggling to explain these variations as well as the dramatic gap
that emerged for the first time in history between Western and non-Western levels of
economic production
 Different rates of wealth and power-creating industrial development, which
heightened disparities within Europe, also greatly magnified existing inequalities
between Europe and the rest of the world
28. Describe industrialization in Continental Europe
 In the newly mechanized industrial, British goods were being produced very
economically, and these goods had come to dominate world markets; British
technology had become so advanced and complicated that few engineers or skilled
technicians outside England understood it
 Continental businesspeople had difficulty finding the large sums of money the new
methods demanded, and laborers bitterly resisted the move to working in factories;
all these factors slowed the spread of machine-powered industry
 Nevertheless, western Europe nations possessed a number of advantages that
helped them respond to their challenges; most had a rich tradition of putting-out
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enterprise, which endowed them with experienced merchant capitalists and skilled
urban artisans
Moreover, while British inventors and entrepreneurs had to discover and implement
new technologies on their own, other nations could simply “borrow” the new methods
developed in Great Britain
European countries had a third asset that many non-Western areas lacked in the
19th century: they had strong, independent governments that did not fall under
foreign political control
These governments would use the power of the state to promote industry and catch
up with Britain